Via Glenn Reynolds, who says, ” I think he’s a fall guy. I’d be very surprised if he’s the highest-up official who was involved in this.” The IRS Washington attorney in question, Carter Hull, also took down his Facebook page.
Carter Hull, the Washington-based IRS lawyer who oversaw targeting of conservative groups beginning in 2010, will retire this summer.
Hull was fingered in interviews with two IRS employees as the overseer of the agency’s improper targeting of conservative groups beginning in 2010.
“I was essentially a front person, because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on [applications] without Carter Hull’s influence or input,” Elizabeth Hofacre, an employee of the IRS’ Cincinnati office, told congressional investigators, according to Hofacre’s interview with congressional investigators.
Hull provided Hofacre a sample letter requesting additional information to send to Tea Party groups in March 2010, after Hofacre appealed to the IRS’ Washington headquarters for help with new applications from Tea Party groups for tax-exempt nonprofit status.
As The Daily Caller reported, Hull signed a letter dated April 21, 2010 to the Albuquerque Tea Party requesting additional information related to its tax-exempt application.
It is unclear at this time whether Hull, an elderly Maryland resident and longtime IRS employee, was planning to retire anyway.
Hull is a sideshow, a non-entity who, as Reynolds suggests, is probably being set up by his superiors to take the fall for this. Hull was simply doing his job. The letter to the Albuquerque Tea Party was SOP — it’s not like the IRS shouldn’t have been asking any questions at all. Hull was confirming that an organization asking for tax exempt status deserved it.
Not so with other, more inappropriate questions, or threats, or harassment. Who sent those? At whose orders? And who thought the whole thing up in the first place?
If Hull feels he’s being set up, he may feel more like talking. I wonder if he’d have anything interesting to say.
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